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AI: So, so tell me about the, about the American Council on Race Relations. Because that was quite an important organization at that time, and it was really important in a new, whole new area of, of thinking and work.

EH: (Yes). That wasn't available at that time. What was, what happened was the war ends, and there's a lot of social awareness, especially among some of the young. And there was, civil rights was not an issue yet. I mean, there was no way to put it into that score. Nobody was -- people were beginning to be aware of it. Lillian Smith was an author who, a southerner who was writing great books. There was one called... "(Strange) Fruit." Anyway, there were new books coming out like that. And the soldiers were coming home from segregated armies, and people really were perking, getting interested, but there was no major study or library doing that at that point. And so when the American Council established itself in a house that was called the Rosenwald House, Julius Rosenwald was a, a Sears Roebuck vice president, a Jewish guy, who met Booker T. Washington probably in the '20s, maybe before that. And had said, "What can someone like me do?" And Booker T. Washington had said that Negro students were having trouble finding college education, and so that was one thing he did. He gave two thousand dollar scholarships to people like Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson, Katherine Dunham, they all had to go to Europe to get their college training. And then the, he gave up his residential house at Forty-seventh and Ellis, a solid, almost a three-story house. And the administration must have been going for some time. It was fairly closely related to University of Chicago. And they had, University of Chicago apparently started researching and organizing a polling method. And I forgot which of the polling agencies that was, but they had a big living room area to start their work. And the American Council on Race Relations was actually on the, above the carriage house in what was called, what was supposed to be servants' quarters. And that was fine except that the, we needed a library, and the library, there wasn't room for a library up there. So we, we were in the big house on the second floor. Sizeable space, but it wasn't long, even -- I didn't, I don't know how soon I, I got there after that started, but pretty soon we were flooded with college students. Because U. Chicago, Northwestern, Roosevelt, there were four or five major colleges, all and, all sent these students that were interested in this subject. And we had barely enough desks for those of us that worked there. So the poor guys -- I don't remember seeing a lot of girls -- but the poor guys were having to stand there leaning on file cabinets, and leaning on the walls and bookshelves, looking at the text that they were interested.

Ralph worked for, he was a part-time secretary for Joe Lowman, who was a criminology professor at U. Chicago, and was then heading a new agency called (Segregation) in the Nation's Capital. And Joe Lowman's kind of big, bustly kind of guy, and his desk was always kind of disorganized, and he was always growling at Ralph and saying, "Don't touch anything." But Ralph would have to do a lot of typing, and he managed -- the nice part of that job was they had hired a British pair of housekeepers, and they did all the cooking and all the cleaning, so there must have been fifty or sixty of us that had lunch, well-prepared, in a basement level. And it wasn't that, that much of a basement feeling, we had daylight windows all over. And, but it was a great place because people would come from all over the place. I, Mary McCloud Bethun was on the board of Segregation in the Nation's Capital, and she would stop by and see how the library was going. And any number of people like that. S.I. Hayakawa was a very respected liberal president of Illinois Tech, which wasn't very far from that location, and he would come in for lunch. And he certainly was a changed person by the time he got to San Francisco.

But anyway, it was fascinating place, and my job was just to try to keep up with every article and news item that came out about race. And even in the late '40s, that was a lot. But the librarian, Evelyn Apperson, was a Fisk graduate -- no, she was a, she was Smith graduate, but went to Fisk for her librarianship. And we, the other gal that was there was Mary Sabusawa, who was a very active JACLer, and she was an Antioch graduate who, Antioch had the system of working six months and going to school six months. So she had, in her early assignment for work, she had, happened to be placed at American Council. And I think they liked what she was doing, and she was very verbal and, and fairly undaunting, aggressive, you wanna say. She helped organize, I think, kind of a new agency. Certainly a House organ called National Association for Intergroup Relations Organizations. It was, it became a regular newsletter, good-sized newsletter, again, bringing to fore, to the fore, all the things that were happening across the country that were intergroup relations kind of issues.

And one of the things, I remember working in the library was, here was a whole pile of news and articles coming in about Seattle's housing projects. And Benjamin MacAdoo was a black, young black architect, and he had designed these. And we kept getting picture after picture of Seattle's housings. And we were amazed that they didn't have the big skyscrapers or the slums that we saw in other cities. But that, that was impressive, I remember.

<End Segment 53> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.